How far would you go to fight for your children? That’s the question posed by Toxic Town, a new limited series that dramatizes the true story of the Corby poisonings that started decades ago, in the 1980s. If you’re not familiar with the environmental scandal that rocked the small English former steel town of Corby, you’re not alone. Even Toxic Town writer Jack Thorne (The Swimmers, His Dark Materials) was unaware of the case that’s been called “the British Erin Brockovich,” in which a group of mothers whose children had developed birth defects confronted their town’s leadership about its alleged mismanagement of toxic waste materials.

“I didn’t know the story,” Thorne tells Tudum. “I’d never heard of the people involved, and I’d never heard of the case until it was brought to me by [my co-executive producers Annabel Jones and Charlie Brooker].” Once Thorne dove into the material, he was shocked at how perfectly the unfolding of events aligned itself with the dramatic structure of a television series. “It had within it a lot of drama,” he says, “whether it’s the story of the trial itself, or whether it’s the way that these women got together and battled together.”

Read on to learn more about Toxic Town, on Netflix later this month.

Synposis:

Based on one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals, Toxic Town is the story of the people at the heart of the Corby poisonings. Focusing on a group of mothers who took on a David and Goliath battle for justice, the series traces the years of their fight as a terrible truth comes to the surface.

“The more you look into it, the more complicated it all becomes,” Thorne says of the story. “I’ve done legal dramas before, but this one … being taken through the actual truth of it and seeing the journey that they had to go on in order to prove this, I found very surprising and shocking.”

Given what the women had to do in order to get accountability from those in power, Thorne also found their commitment to be tremendously inspiring. “There’s just so much internalized blame that these women obviously had [to deal with],” he says. But, he notes, they were able to “collectively join together and work to actually empower not just themselves and their children, living or dead, but a whole community.”

“It was just so incredible to see and to see how it affected other parts of their life,” he continues. “It’s not just this simple hero’s journey of women banding together and fighting the man and getting this court victory. There’s nothing simple about it at all. You see where their power comes from, which is really just in the most basic level of humanity that they show for each other.”

The cast of Toxic Town includes:

Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who) as Susan McIntyre
Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education) as Tracey Taylor
Claudia Jessie (Bridgerton) as Maggie Mahon
Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty) as Sam Hagen
Brendan Coyle (Downton Abbey) as Roy Thomas
Rory Kinnear (The Diplomat) as Des Collins
Stephen McMillan (Boiling Point)
Lauren Lyle (Outlander)
Joe Dempsie (Game of Thrones)
Michael Socha (This Is England)
Karla Crome (Carnival Row)

Toxic Town is a dramatized series that’s based on the real case of the Corby poisonings, which saw a group of mothers (three of whom are played in the series by Whittaker, Wood, and Jessie) challenge their town’s council over alleged toxic waste mismanagement. It’s a story of community resilience in the face of institutional negligence and greed — and the power of parents’ love for their children.